The Learning Curve

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The Learning Curve Page 21

by Mandy Berman


  It was eighty-two degrees and sunny on the day that Lucy died.

  It is human nature to do this: look back on the day a tragedy occurs and focus on the minute details of it, as if it were impossible that something so massive could happen under circumstances so average. “The ordinary instant,” Joan Didion calls it. “Confronted with sudden disaster,” she writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, “we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred.”

  Only, in the case of Lucy, the circumstances were quite remarkable, because the sudden change in weather had everything to do with her unthinkable death. It is remarkable that we all swam at the lake that day. It is remarkable that Lucy’s age group—the thirteen-year-old girls—happened to have their swim period last in the day, and that they submerged themselves into the water at the very moment the first cloud made its way across the sky. And it is most remarkable that Lucy’s rebellious streak drove her to stay in the lake a whole thirty seconds after the rest of the girls, after the lifeguard’s warning whistle at the first sound of thunder—for the lightning, when it struck, could only be attracted to her, where she was gleefully wading toward the aluminum dock while the first raindrops fell on her already wet hair, and her alone.

  Her family was told that she died immediately, which was likely untrue, but was a way to put them at ease. “She felt no pain,” the doctor at Litchfield General Hospital said in the fluorescent-lit lobby, which was a small consolation for the sudden death of a thirteen-year-old, but a consolation nonetheless.

  For her mother, who had spent her whole life praising Lucy, treating her as the favorite of the family, life as she knew it had suddenly, irrevocably ended—not only Lucy’s life, but her own. Her entire sense of self-worth was wrapped around being a mother—Lucy’s mother, at that. She spent months trying to understand it—reading about lightning striking and the odds of it happening. The chance of being struck in one’s lifetime was one in thirteen thousand. And only 10 percent of those people actually died. But of course, well, the chances were 100 percent for Lucy.

  I still remember the memorial service like it was yesterday: my brother, Sean, going up there to say something in his stoic way, never crying, and never looking up from his paper, either. My aunt who didn’t even know Lucy all that well talking about what an angelic girl she was, like she’d never done a bad thing in her entire short life.

  And me? What did I have to say for myself? No matter what, it felt like my words were not enough. It made me think about the beginning of Love Story, that novel I loved so much when I was sixteen, I read it four times over the course of one year: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” Only, Lucy was so much younger than that. Who even knew if what she loved would stick? She loved horses and High School Musical when she was thirteen, when she died. She loved summer camp and her friends. She didn’t even like boys yet. I’m not sure if she loved me.

  But, I went up there too, and talked about Lucy as if she was my best friend, as if we were thick as thieves. I still feel like it was the greatest betrayal of my lif

  14.

  “FIONA!”

  The sound of her own name punched her into wakefulness. Her neck was sore.

  “Huh?” she said, looking around the room and rubbing the back of her neck. She was in her desk chair. Her head had fallen on her folded arms.

  “We have to leave for class in five minutes.” Liv was dressed, made-up, even her boots were already on. “Did you make copies?”

  “What?” Fiona looked at her laptop, the screen now black, and clicked the trackpad. The Word document appeared. The sentence she’d been writing was unfinished. She’d labored over those first two pages, fell asleep likely sometime between two and three in the morning as she thought about what actually needed to happen in this story. “Shit.”

  Fiona jumped into action, changing from her pajama bottoms to jeans, not bothering to change out of her sweatshirt, no bra underneath. She pulled Ugg boots onto her feet, which she normally did only for Sundays at the library, and threw her hair into a sloppy bun. She printed out one copy of the story and grabbed her tote bag from the back of her chair and her puffy coat from the hook on the door.

  “I’ll meet you there!” she called to Liv, running down the stairs and out of the house, toward the Writing Cottage.

  It had snowed a bit the night before, she was dismayed to learn, and her traction-less boots slipped and slid as she ran down North Abbott Street. She turned right at Phillips Avenue, where more students appeared, and she missed seeing a patch of black ice on the sidewalk, tripping and falling over herself, her arms going first, the rest of her body following. Her puffy jacket cushioned the fall, but her hands, not in gloves, were scraped and dirty and cold.

  “Shit!” she heard a guy say from behind her. Across Phillips Avenue, a trio of underclass girls laughed. “You okay?” the man’s voice asked, at which point she knew immediately who had witnessed her fall. He reached his hand out to her, and she took it.

  “Thanks,” she said, and she felt his forearm tighten as she held onto it tightly to pull herself up.

  “What’s the hurry?” Professor Ash asked. “I never start class on time.”

  “I have to make copies.”

  Professor Ash shrugged. “Do it at the break.” He frowned at her. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, dusting herself off. “Lucky I’m dressed like the abominable snowman.”

  “You do look warm,” he said, appraising her outfit. They walked the remaining block together making small talk that she tried desperately hard to concentrate on, for fear that she might burst into tears at any moment.

  * * *

  —

  The Writing Cottage was a new building on campus that some wealthy parent of an aspiring writing undergrad had funded. It was a two-story house on Phillips Avenue, with a kitchen, a dining room, offices upstairs and, downstairs, a cozy living room with a fireplace—never lit—where writing workshops took place. Students sat on couches and in plush lounge chairs while Professor Ash sat in an armchair at the front of the room, his papers and books awkwardly resting on his lap. The room was surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, and during their class period, from ten until one on Thursdays, light streamed in, casting the room in a wintry, white-yellow glow.

  They started the class by discussing the short story “Popular Mechanics” by Raymond Carver, which Professor Ash had assigned for homework. Fiona had read it, but, naturally, had forgotten her copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in her tizzy that morning. The story was a single scene, a domestic scuffle between a couple. It began with the couple arguing, the man packing his things in his suitcase: he’s leaving the woman, or at least threatening to. Then Carver reveals that there’s also a baby in the house, and the man and the woman start to fight over who gets to keep it, which turns into a literal tug-of-war over the child. It ends with these three ominous sentences: “But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard. In this manner, the issue was decided.”

  Professor Ash began. “Does anyone want to start with their initial impressions of the story?”

  Liv’s hand shot up. She was always the first to volunteer an opinion. Professor Ash seemed to wait a few more moments to see if anyone else would raise a hand. No one did.

  “Liv,” he said, his voice even.

  “Well, I couldn’t help but notice that Carver clearly wanted us to come to our own conclusions on that last line. ‘The issue was decided’—the use of passive voice is intentional there. It allows us to feel that the fate of the baby is no longer in the hands of this couple; it’s now something that’s happening to them, beyond their control, whereas the rest of the sto
ry is very much character-driven actions. ‘He fastened the suitcase,’ ‘They knocked down a flowerpot,’ ‘She caught the baby around the wrist,’ and so on.”

  “Yes. Good,” Professor Ash said. “The passive voice at the end is not accidental. Though the story isn’t entirely in active voice until then. Where else do we see passive voice?” Fiona loved watching him teach: the seriousness in his affect, the furrow to his brow. She held on to their night at the bar, seeing him tipsy, unhinged. She had seen a side of him none of her classmates had.

  “The first paragraph,” one of the boys offered. The boys never raised their hands. “ ‘Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.’ Instead of, just ‘it got dark’ or ‘it was dark.’ The ‘getting’ implies something happening in real time to the house.” Fiona didn’t think this was quite right—that wasn’t technically passive voice, she thought, but she didn’t want to take the chance of being wrong. She didn’t have her book with her to confirm it, and Liv was poring too intently over the two pages, underlining and notating, for Fiona to look on with her.

  “Also,” another one of the girls chimed in. This was Naomi, blond, whippet thin, who only wore expensive black clothes. “The man actually is always active. For him it’s ‘He gripped,’ ‘He worked.’ While things happen to the woman: ‘She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.’ Which actually makes me believe that the man wins the argument and gets the baby. He’s certainly winning throughout.”

  “Yeah, but,” Dave said, “why the passivity of the last sentence, then? I don’t think either of them gets the baby. If so, it would have ended on ‘He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.’ That last sentence is used to create more ambiguity, to pull back in scope and even the playing field and to leave us wondering.”

  “You’re all missing the point,” said Julia, who Fiona thought was the best writer in the class, flipping her braids over one shoulder. “The point is they both become so focused on winning this particular argument that they use their child as a totem and in the end they both lose. Nothing was going to stop the fight unless something happened to the baby outside of their control. You have two stubborn people who are not going to give up on the matter. Something major had to happen to the kid or else the story would never end. It’s not about winning—it’s about the inciting incident in and of itself.”

  Everyone was quiet there for a few seconds, realizing Julia was right. She got to the quick of it under two minutes.

  “Let’s return to that first paragraph,” Professor Ash said, and he read two lines aloud: “ ‘Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.’ ” Fiona hated that sort of sparse writing that everyone else seemed to revere. She assumed that Carver thought “it was getting dark on the inside too” was supposed to sound profound, but if she’d read that in a workshop submission, she’d have written next to it, Cliché.

  * * *

  —

  After the break—and after Fiona had made copies, flushing with shame as the copier spat out the unfinished story—Professor Ash opened up the workshop on Sophie’s Paris story.

  “What’s working here?” he asked the class, starting, as he always did, with the positives.

  “I like the narrative frame of the piece,” Liv offered. “The way that Sophie begins in the present, then loops back to the past, then ends back in that present moment.”

  “Okay. And what did that do for your reading experience?”

  “It piqued my curiosity. It made me want to understand why the present moment was so significant.”

  “But it wasn’t, actually, was it?” Fiona asked. “I mean. We have this moment with Natasha waiting for Michel to come over, but then the flashback actually tells us incredibly little about their relationship.”

  “Isn’t there mystery inherent in that, though?” Liv said.

  “Not necessarily,” Fiona said. “The loop is just about Natasha moving to Paris and meeting Michel once, and we get so little emotional development and understanding of why they care about each other. Nothing about their connection feels authentic or interesting.”

  “Let’s spend a little more time talking about what else is working first,” Professor Ash said, clearly attempting to redirect. Fiona shrank back; had she been too cruel? She looked at Sophie, in her boot-cut jeans and sorority sweatshirt. Her face was contorted into ugliness, her brow furrowed in anguish. Fiona supposed she’d been trying to impress Oliver Ash. Again.

  At the end of class, she handed out her copies, then grabbed Liv by the arm and led her out of the building before Fiona could register any of their faces skimming over the first page.

  * * *

  “What’s working here?” Professor Ash asked about Fiona’s piece the following week. Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

  “I think the emotional honesty of it is so raw,” said Sophie, whom Fiona had practically eviscerated the week before. “I really felt so sad about Lucy dying. I felt like I knew her.”

  “Yeah,” said Dave. “I agree. It was incredibly sad.”

  The entire class nodded in assent.

  “I also really liked the use of the camp setting,” said Julia. “It’s this place that clearly holds so much significance and innocence for both the narrator and Lucy, and the fact that the ultimate innocence is lost there adds much more of a sense of tragedy to the piece.”

  Had these people read the right story?

  “Yes, that’s true,” Professor Ash agreed. “The camp setting resonates. It’s clearly important and familiar to the narrator, and through her eyes, we see it clearly. Were there any places that you felt the setting could be utilized more?”

  The class deferred this question and instead talked at length about the narrator’s relationship to Lucy—how sad it was, how memorable, how true. Soon Fiona’s classmates were extolling the virtues of the nameless narrator, who we don’t know is the sister until the second page—to “allow for more room for personal interpretation at the beginning,” Sophie argued—and then, again, back to the emotional honesty of the piece.

  “What about the action of the piece?” Professor Ash pushed. “Were there things you would have liked to see happen in the story, other than the backstory of this girl’s death?”

  It was obvious no one wanted to say that it wasn’t good, that it lacked immediacy or urgency. That it was actually unfinished, half-baked crap. For the first time in this class, no one chose to be remotely critical. As Sophie raved on and on about the use of the past tense, Fiona thought about how critical she’d been about her story the previous week. Why couldn’t Sophie serve the same thing back?

  Of course: they were trying to tiptoe around the thing they all knew actually happened. Fiona didn’t think that even half the people in this workshop knew what had happened to her sister, but Sophie, the gossip-monger, did, and Fiona imagined the truth about Helen spreading among the workshop members like wildfire. And now they were conflating this story with Fiona’s life.

  Then again, so had Fiona. The way the girl in her story died was not how Helen had died, but every other part of it was true: Her age. The camp setting. The relationship between the sisters. The students seemed to worry that in critiquing the story, they would also be critiquing Fiona’s tragedy. While Fiona knew she should have felt gratitude toward them for attempting to spare her feelings, instead she felt anger. She wanted to scream. Why couldn’t anyone talk about this like the thing it was: brutal and terrible and true? Why did everyone have to tiptoe around Helen like she’d never happened at all? Or like Fiona and Helen’s relationship had been perfect and beautiful and that loss was uniformly sad and the response should be uniformly sympathetic, no nuance to it? They only knew that Helen had died; they didn’t know that the girls were ne
ver friends, constantly bickering, constantly in competition with each other over their mother’s love, a competition that Helen was always winning.

  After class, Fiona’s classmates offered her sad smiles as they returned their copies of the story to her. Fiona approached Professor Ash.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” he asked, waiting for everyone to stream out. Liv stopped at the doorway.

  “I’ll meet you at home,” Fiona said to Liv, who offered a tentative wave on her way out.

  “Before I give this to you,” he said, “I want to apologize, preemptively, if they’re a bit harsh.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I, uh.” He was rolling the story into a tube. She had never seen him look nervous before. “I had not realized the story was so personal to you. Normally…Oh, how do I say this without sounding like a complete prick? You didn’t finish the story. You handed in work that was clearly incomplete. And, well, in my experience, the death of a young person, and often of a sibling, is a sort of predictable conceit in my students’ fiction. Now I can tell from the way the class reacted to your story…Well, it seems that perhaps you have some firsthand experience in this. I don’t mean to pry. I just mean to apologize if anything in here is particularly hurtful.”

  “Bad fiction is bad fiction, right?” she said.

  He didn’t say anything to this.

  “The story was bad. I want objective feedback. I didn’t get it from anyone else.”

  “All right,” he said, unrolling her story and then handing it to her. “If you want to talk about it further, I’m here.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” she said, slipping the copy into her bag. “I’ll see you next week.”

  * * *

  —

  Outside, once far enough down Phillips Avenue that Professor Ash wouldn’t see her, Fiona pulled his copy out and turned quickly through the pages.

 

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